ART/ARCHITECTURE; And the Artist Recreated Nature (or an Illusion of It)

THE artist Olafur Eliasson has dyed rivers green in Stockholm, Bremen and Tokyo; unleashed a small flood on the streets of Johannesburg; illuminated the sky of Utrecht with an artificial sun; and lodged an ice floe in tropical Sao Paolo.

''I just proposed simulating a small earthquake during recess at a children's school in Munich,'' Mr. Eliasson said during a recent visit to New York. ''But I couldn't get permission.''

Using simple gestures and materials richly evocative of nature (like light, water, fire, steam and ice), Mr. Eliasson creates sculptures, site-specific installations and environmental works, sometimes in unusual venues, that are startlingly beautiful, even as they make us question the gap between perception and reality.

His exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston opens on Wednesday and will include both early pieces, like a gas-fueled, wall-mounted ring of fire, which the artist created in 1993, and new installations featuring an expanse of water and a circular gallery filled with light.

Tucked away in separate rooms will be photographs and prints documenting the landscape of Iceland. Mr. Eliasson, who is 33, was born in Denmark to Icelandic parents and spent much of his childhood on that island; though now based in Berlin, he returns there frequently. Iceland's lunar and unstable terrain, with its stark, majestic mountains, lava fields and glaciers, its fast-moving clouds and bubbling geothermal activity, provides an autobiographical thread for his many artistic activities.

''My work is not about nostalgia for a lost nature,'' Mr. Eliasson said. ''Rather, I use the re-creation of natural phenomena, like rainbows, ice fields or lightning, to talk about the issue of how we see ourselves in our surroundings. The relationship between the spectator and whatever she's looking at is what really interests me. It's a relationship that has many implications beyond the experience of art.''

For ''Your Now Is My Surroundings,'' an installation last fall at the Bonakdar Jancou Gallery in Chelsea, Mr. Eliasson built an enclosed, raised space, which was entered through a plain, industrial-gray door. Within, the air was moist and chilly; looking up, viewers saw the metal frame of a skylight whose panes had been removed, the resulting opening surrounded by a rectangular frieze of mirrors reflecting and refracting sky, sun, clouds and moon. The infinite splendors of the firmament (so easily forgotten amid New York's man-made caverns) lay suddenly revealed, but the work's thrill was accompanied by an unsettling ambiguity. Were we inside or outside? Was this nature, or culture, or something in between? The spectacle of that uncertainty was mesmerizing.

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Mr. Eliasson began working with light while he was a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, as a reaction against the object-oriented art market of the 1980's, in response to investigations of perception by philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson, and inspired by the work of the West Coast artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell. ''I was wondering how I could dematerialize the art object,'' he said, ''to put more focus on the spectator.''

A piece in his show at the Art Institute of Chicago last summer consisted of flourescent lights diffused through a translucent white scrim, which was hung overhead in an empty room. At irregular intervals the lights would suddenly dim, as if a cloud were moving across the sun. Someone passing quickly through the room might miss the work entirely; those who lingered for a moment gained a heightened awareness of the emotional and psychological effects of illumination.

Mr. Eliasson's art echoes the mystical explorations of light and landscape in the 19th-century paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the films of the Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer. But they looked at nature and saw the hand of God in it. Mr. Eliasson pulls back the curtain, revealing the humble technologies and optical tricks that lie behind his divine illusions.

Jessica Morgan, who organized the Boston show, admires Mr. Eliasson's combination of ''spectacular effects with very simple, almost out-dated machinery.''

''There's a humility of materials and attitude in his work,'' she said. ''Yet its atmosphere is so other-worldly.''

At the heart of the work lies a deep commitment to art's cultivation of unpredictability. ''Showing the value of something that's unpredictable can also be seen as a critique of society,'' Mr. Eliasson said. ''Practically everything that happens when we walk down the street has been organized to avoid surprises. Tell me one other place in our culture where you don't know exactly what's going to happen next.''